Would you even 'want' a life hereafter?

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I'm willing to bet you were joking here, but our sense of self in life is but an illusion.

Or is illusion your sense of life, in self?

confusipants, stop trying to confuse me

Is it my pants that are confused, or the pants within your mind?

I surely don't think about your pants. Sorry to disappoint.

That's good, pants should play no part in your thoughts about me

I find the concept of "hereafter" being a Christian country club where you are the same person you were in life doing fun activities forever after to be really hilarious.

If there is any form of "hereafter" I highly doubt the ego, memories, or anything of the sort survives the death of the brain..

If there is something like that and I find myself there by some odd fluke they better have Yuengling on draft.


That's just it; they aren't built to handle eternity. They're too needy, too impulsive, too easily....bored.

If the afterlife is anything like this world, then count me out.

That's a teensy bit of an understatement.

I wouldn't say it's an illusion, but that it's more like the map isn't the territory.

you obviously can take this or leave this, but my take on it is that our sojourns down here in this hellworld are akin to classes or courses of study in a great [but brutally tough] school, and just as one doesn't dwell on their 8th grade geometry class travails during summer vacation, neither would they necessarily dwell upon their past life just departed, upon matriculation into the bright summer world above [IOW "the ultimate summer vacation"]. your heavenly identity or persona would be the core "YOU" and not the role you played in the most recent earthly costume ball. you would not necessarily be the same limited and blinkered human personality in the big upstairs. you would be plugged-in to the great illumination and would be totally unfettered by earthly concerns. it is only something to be looked forward-to with controlled [but welcoming] anticipation.

Are you suggesting our sense of self is the map and our self is the territory?

I've entertained that one before and its pretty much exactly what I was getting at with the Sylvia Brown outlook. What shot the wind out of that for me was that many people in this world get s&*( on, s&(* on, and s^&* on some more. They don't learn a lesson, there is no lesson to be learned. They might be starving to death under warlords. They and their families might be getting strung up and tortured by a despot. They might have been in the region of China that was brutalized by the Khans, they might have lived in 16th/17th century slums somewhere in Europe where feces was stacked chest high in the middle of the street. You also have plenty of people who don't start out with those kinds of problems who run into a problem, they have their "Eureka! I get it! I get why I needed this to happen to me and I've learned my lesson!" but the problem rather than stopping there continues on, and on, and on, until they're burned down to little more than a shell of a person.

Aside from the message that s&*( falls out of the sky on anyone and everyone who's so lucky, I don't really get the sense that there's much of a lesson to take back. My other fear: me being the type of person I am in this life where my semi-serious or prior depth-chasing tendencies are highly unpopular with most people, wouldn't that do little more than make me a misfit in the hereafter as well if I were to carry any of that with me at all? While the Sylvia Brown model seems the most optimistic its just been incredibly difficult for me to take it as anything more than wishful thinking, especially as I can't find any teleology to support it.

The only other thing with Sylvia herself; my mom got me some of her cd's to listen to and it seems to rest on the notion that she's tapped into this sort of 'ultimate reality' via her spirit guide. That's fine and good *if* her worldview is dead-aim accurate and I can't find any major factual flaws. She said a lot of things that shot that one down, including the indication that 'racism' around the world was dominantly a North American thing. That pretty much torpedoed any notion that she was having anything other than temporal lobe seizures at best or running a heck of an elaborate scam at worst.

BTW - I don't mean to put guilt-by-association on that philosophy or to torpedo it specifically on Sylvia but I don't know who else proposes that. Let me know if you have another source, I'd be curious to know if that outlook does have a significantly older or more traversed set of religious beliefs surrounding it than late 20th century New Age Gnostic-revisionism, ie. I'd rather be fair to the idea and not cancel its merits simply because I first heard it from a dubious source.

I don't know if I want it or don't want it, but I'm convinced the reality is an infinite cycle of deaths and rebirths.

To me that would be significantly worse than dying and ceasing to exist for eternity.